It never seemed to matter to Palgrave whether anyone was in the room with him when he made these learned remarks. At first it struck me as a sort of foppish affectation, like an ascot or an ivory-tipped swagger stick, meant to suggest a man of rare breeding set down among the heathens. I imagined him practicing at home, leaning against a bedroom wall, sighing deeply as he tossed off Latin epigrams. But in time I came to realize that he genuinely didn’t care what anyone thought of him—didn’t even consider it, in fact. There were a lot of people like that at LifeSpan Books.

You may not remember LifeSpan. They were the people who produced “multi-volume continuity reference works” on various subjects—low-fat cooking, home repair, World War II—and sent them to you in the mail, once every two months. You’d sign up for a series on, say, gardening, and soon the books would begin to arrive, filling you with optimism and resolve. They’d start you off with Perennials, followed two months later by Flowering Houseplants, then Vegetables and Fruits. You’d dip in here and there—do a little aerating, maybe visit a garden center—and congratulate yourself on making such a good start. Perhaps next year, you’d tell yourself, you might even be able to grow your own carrots and tomatoes. And the books would keep coming and coming. Annuals. Ferns. Lawns and Ground Cover. You never realized there would be quite so many. Still, some of them look quite interesting. Maybe a little more detail than you bargained for, but it’s good. Really, it’s good. And besides, you’ll be able to get back out to the garden after the Little League season ends. Bulbs. Herbs. Evergreens. It begins to dawn on you, at the start of the third year, that perhaps you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. For one thing, you’re running out of shelf space. You start stacking the books up on the worktable in the garage. You’ll sort it out in the spring. Shade Gardens. Orchids. Vines. One night around ten thirty, during tax season, you try phoning the toll-free number where operators are standing by, in an effort to take them up on the offer of “cancel anytime if not completely satisfied.” Your resolve crumbles as you spend forty-five minutes on hold listening to “Gospel Bluegrass Classics,” available now from LifeSpan Music. Pruning and Grafting. Shrubs. Wildflowers. The last of your children goes off to college. There will be time now for some serious gardening; you might even make a start on a pergola, if only your back weren’t giving you so much trouble. Roses. Miniatures and Bonsai. Rock and Water Gardens. Over the winter holidays a sudden snowstorm drives your grandchildren indoors. They use the stored cartons of books to build a fort. Cacti and Succulents. Winter Gardens. Heat-Zone Gardens. It is a beautiful day in late September and your eldest son is walking a real estate agent through the house. “Yes,” he says, “it was very sudden, in the garden. He would have wanted it that way.” As they’re signing the papers, they hear the soft thump of a package at the door: Organics.

I applied for an editorial job at LifeSpan straight out of journalism school. They brought me in for an interview with the managing editor, the tenor of which had less to do with my qualifications than with the apparent rarity of the opening. “We haven’t had a vacancy here in nearly a decade, Mr. Clarke,” he kept saying. “Quite extraordinary, really. So I’m afraid I’m a bit rusty on procedure. We should have coffee, I suppose, yes?”

His name was Peter Albamarle, and he radiated a sense of wary befuddlement, as though someone kept hiding his stapler. “I don’t suppose you went to Princeton?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “NYU. It’s there on my résumé.”

Albamarle glanced down at the paper and placed his fingers on it as if it might crawl away. “A very good school. Very good. I only ask because so many of our old boys are Princeton men. With a few Dartmouth types here and there.”

He waited a moment as if I might suddenly recall that I had gone to Princeton after all. I shook my head.

“Well, that’s neither here nor there,” he continued. “We were most impressed with your application. With that piece you wrote.” He pushed a copy of a small academic journal across the desk at me. It contained an article I’d written: “Connected by Fate: Aspects of Dickensian Happenstance.” My debut in print. I nodded and tried to look appropriately modest, like a Princeton man.

“That’s how our recruiters found you. We rely heavily on our recruiters. And they were right about you. You have a fine sense of the balance of fact and narrative.”

“Thank you.”

“And it strikes me as remarkable that your article should have come across my desk just now. We occasionally take on a new photo editor or researcher, of course, but the writing jobs never turn over. Never!” His eyes widened at the wonder of the thing.

“How is it that the job became available, if I might ask?”

“Oh,” his face darkened. “Jane Rossmire. She was tremendously competent, really a most extraordinarily good worker, but she left us suddenly. A bit awkward. We won’t speak of it. I’m sure she’s doing much better now. And no one really blames Thaddeus Palgrave.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean to say, no one really believes—ah! Miss Taylor! Will you take young Mr. Clarke down the hall for his writing trial? Purely a formality, you understand, I’m sure the pashas upstairs will approve my decision, but there it is.”

He said nothing more as I was led away to an empty office. I had been warned about this stage of the interview process and had studied up at the library with some old copies of the Ancient Worlds series. As I understood the exercise, I was expected to take several bulky packets of material from the research department and turn them into a smooth, lulling sort of prose, in much the same way that blocks of cheddar are emulsified into Cheez Whiz. The tough part was writing transitions, which often marked huge shifts of time or geography. Despite such intriguing glimpses from prehistory, students of archeology seem time and again drawn to a later period, to the sweep of centuries from about the thirteenth century B.C. up to the Christian era. This stuff is harder than it looks. According to office legend, one writer had his contract terminated over the phrase: “Meanwhile, far across the Caspian Sea . . .”

Apparently my sample essay on the marriage of Hatshepsut met with general approval. By the end of the week I had signed on as a junior editor on the Civil War series. If all went according to plan, I would serve an apprentice period on the research staff, then ease into some small-scale writing assignments, like captions and sidebars, and finally ascend to the Valhalla where chapters were written.

There are some who would tell you that LifeSpan Books was no place for an ambitious young journalist. I would respectfully disagree. At that time LifeSpan was part of a vast empire of magazines, including Styles and NewsBeat. The books division was where they sent the career correspondents who needed a tune-up or a drying-out period. I learned a lot from those guys. I remember one afternoon—the day of the Challenger shuttle disaster—when I tagged along with a group of them to watch the coverage at the corner saloon. They sat around talking about the ledes they had written nineteen years earlier on the day of Apollo 1. It was a three-martini master class. You don’t get that in J-school.

At that time there were only two other people in the building who were under age thirty, a pair of photo editors named Brian Frost and Kate Macintyre. They scooped me up on my first day and taught me the rules of the road—the location of the supply closet, the proper operation of the balky Xerox, the kabuki ritual of the time sheets. After work they took me out for beer and nachos, insisting that it was a company tradition. “When you pass your research apprenticeship, you start making real money,” Brian explained. “Then the nachos are on you.”